Mad Skills

by Greatshell, Walter

  If the human mind could be transplanted, that meant a person could theoretically live forever.

  There had been no gas leak in the fun house. What had happened to Maddy and Ben was grand theft. They had been deliberately set up, stripped down, their minds stolen and rebuilt as part of some crazy immortality experiment.

  The problem was, not everyone was meant to live forever. Immortality was to be a perk of membership in a very select club. The rest of humanity would get the consolation prize: a coach-class ticket to Lemmington. That was the no-frills operation, the basic cable, which was already cranking out dozens of happy customers a day.

  So that’s what they’ve done to us, Maddy thought.

  Even with her new brainpower, she had never understood how they were able to recover her memories. All the auxiliary computing power in the world couldn’t magically rewrite the complex web of synapses that had been destroyed in the accident. At best she should have been a blank slate, starting over from the beginning. Instead, she was a fully formed person, as if somehow they had been keeping her soul on ice and just had to thaw it out. System Restore. Which was exactly what they must have done.

  But how?

  Maddy went looking. She could see the whole layout of the mine: how they had automated it like a regular assembly line, with robots and revolving operating tables like spokes in a wheel, each turn a stage in the implant procedure, until at the end patients were whisked away to Recovery/Post-Op, where their brand spanking new brains were saturated day and night with canned experiences, captured memories enhanced with pharmaceutical neurotransmitters and positive reinforcement. Then off to Harmony for a little street conditioning … before being released into the real world.

  Oh yes, there were many thousands of them already out there. American society had been thoroughly infiltrated, right up to the White House. Not the president himself—not yet. That was perhaps for the next election, or the one after that. But they were among his advisers. And it wasn’t just the goons from Braintree, but all the corporate offshoots and international subsidiaries and government affiliates—all the grim, bloated piglets suckling off the monstrous brood sow known as the Mogul Cooperative. Its bastards were everywhere, up to the highest levels of government.

  Looking at Braintree’s list of political connections, Maddy gasped to see a familiar face: Vellon. The man she’d dreamed of killing in the limo. She had done her best to forget that night, burying it in a dark corner of her mind, never quite sure if it had really happened. But there he was, his pointed head on a flock of obituaries. Only his name was not really Vellon.

  It was Joseph Lawlor—Congressman Lawlor.

  Maddy suddenly realized that she remembered Lawlor from one of her earliest dreams, postop, when she was still a basket case touring Braintree in the company of her folks. There was a big shot congressman from Washington there, and Dr. Plummer had been giving them all a tour. No wonder Vellon looked familiar.

  From deleted e-mails, Maddy learned that Lawlor was invited to Braintree in the hope that he would petition Congress to approve an increase in Braintree’s funding. But the congressman had his own ideas. He was a disturbed man who saw possibilities in Harmony far beyond anything the doctors ever intended, and he demanded they put him in charge of the project … or he would open an investigation to expose it. Lawlor wanted Harmony to be his own personal toy box. Dr. Plummer refused, but Dr. Stevens recommended they play along; she was a fan of hardball. So Lawlor became Dean Vellon, and a fake election was held between two fictitious candidates: Vellon and Strode.

  Lawlor was confident of victory. That was the beauty of Harmony: Nothing was left to chance. But he made the mistake of celebrating prematurely. He requested a companion for the evening.

  So they sent Maddy.

  Like a windup toy, like a perfect little robot, she fulfilled her function. But the pressure of killing must have been too much, causing her psyche to crack like an egg. It sheared apart, hatching a furry little avatar of destruction—her own remorseless id in the form of a raccoon named Moses.

  But no more, she thought. You jerks haven’t got me yet. I’m still human—human enough to jack you up.

  Entering a file called Madzog 227, Maddy found herself at the center of a thousand-faceted jewel—a vast crystal ball comprised of smaller crystals—whose every mirrored face was a door that opened on command, expanding to reveal a playlet from her own childhood, some familiar scene or sensory impression. Extremely familiar.

  What the frick? she thought, scanning furiously.

  Every scene was a flashback—these were bottled memories of every significant or not-so-significant moment in her life, digital collages assembled from snippets of 3-D high-def video, reconstructions and reenactments and lifelike CGI. These were her memories, a pirated Greatest Hits collection of her entire past. It was as if a thief had been in her mind, illegally downloading the stuff that made her her.

  So this was the source from which Maddy flowed, the headwaters of her mind, comprising everything she had ever seen, heard, tasted, smelled, or felt, from age three to age fifteen. All converted to code and readily download-able into any neuroconductive holographic quantum matrix. Such as her implant.

  The question was, how did they get the stuff?

  Following branching links like a snake seeking eggs, Maddy plumbed other dossiers, discovering her parents, all her friends and family, with each of their personal histories compiled in a similar fashion. Their bottled lives dangled in cyberspace like so many ornaments on a plastic Christmas tree, while Maddy herself was the star at the top.

  They all existed just to support her delusion. As oddly flattering as it was, she couldn’t help but wonder, Why am I so important?

  There was a radial structure to this tree. Its trunk was the time line of her personal history, and every event in her life was a branch, so that as she followed the central axis downward, she was proceeding backward in time.

  She followed the chain of recorded events from the present day back to the night of the carnival accident—back to the fun house. She’d always wondered what exactly had happened that day, and at last the pieces of the puzzle were hers to assemble:

  She and Ben, kissing in the dark. The hitch in the ride. Ben leaving her alone. Maddy getting off the car and making her way toward the exit. Groping toward the next car, and the hooded figure seated there. And then …

  And then the file ended. There were no records beyond that point, and her personal memories were no help, just the monotonous dreams and impressions left over from her long convalescence.

  So what happened? They had saved her life, yes, she could see that, and there were the implant procedure logs—hers only one of many thousands, including Ben’s. But Maddy’s operation was clearly different in its particulars, a custom job that included a number of steps she wouldn’t have thought necessary, such as orthodontic surgery, a nose job (to make her nose larger!), breast alteration, and other, more obscure cosmetic changes.

  Something was obviously very weird. The data was confusing:

  On the night of the fun-house accident, Maddy’s memories inexplicably converged with a second time line, both cut short by the brain injury. Whose life was that? The ghost time line forked off into darkness, protected by its own password. What was disturbing was that it was an earlier file, to which Maddy’s history had been surgically appended like an extra limb.

  But this was the only life she knew—the childhood world of Madeline Zoe Grant, with all her minor neuroses and her parents and their Ozzie-and-Harriet-from-Hell lifestyle. The recent news that her parents were imposters and she was adopted didn’t make her existence any less real.

  Yet it was not real.

  The life she remembered was the downloaded one, the superfluous one, the overwrite. The shell. The older, hidden time line was clearly the real history, her true story, which had been pruned from her brain like so much deadwood to make way for a nice clean graft.

  Is that all I am—a
graft, a transplant? The more she looked, the more apparent it became. She could see it all in the arrangement of her memories. The timing of them, the selection, the emphasis—it was all a clunky, overly cute montage. Her life had been edited.

  I’m not me.

  An orphan girl had been adopted by Braintree scientists, then used as a template, a sacrificial cow plundered for her “typical” life experiences, which were then coded, digitally embellished, and finally written over the fried neurons of an entirely different person. Since the original Maddy might likely collide with her doppelganger, they couldn’t coexist in the same world. Hence there had to be an artificial world to accommodate the artificial people.

  Harmony.

  I’m a copy, she thought wildly. A counterfeit. Were they all counterfeits, all her friends and family? An entire population of bootleg copies? No—most were just mind-controlled, not mind-Xeroxed. Maddy was one of a select few, a trial run. But where was the genuine Maddy, the source of her memories? Where was her Content Provider now? Obviously not in Denton, or she would have encountered herself. There was no record of any other Madeline Zoe Grant, living or dead.

  Had they killed her?

  It would help if she knew who she really was. Who had this body belonged to before being possessed by Madeline’s decanted spirit? It was tempting to believe that maybe they had simply tampered with her mind and reloaded it back into her own body. At least that would mean she was still at least partially herself.

  There was only one way to find out. Clearly, there was an alternate Maddy Grant in the computer, an alien one she was forbidden to know. The information was buried underground, hidden beneath a layer of redundant encryptions like the severed taproot of her Christmas tree.

  Maddy made a virtual shovel and began digging. In a moment, the ground gave way, revealing a whole other tree beneath—an inverted tree and an entirely new file, this one labeled MARET 99. Maddy opened it up and gasped.

  It was Marina Sweet.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  PEP

  OH shit, she thought. I’m her! I am Marina!

  Marina Sweet was not dead. The golden girl designed to earn the love of millions and fleece them like sheep was alive and kicking in the persona of her biggest fan: Maddy Grant.

  Marina Sweet. The little girl manipulated by her daddy and his corporate overseers to nurture and grow her own legend until it was big enough to sell the ultimate self-help program, the final bandwagon from which no voice of dissent would ever again trouble the dreams of the mighty: No pep? Want pep? Marina Sweet says, “Get PEP!”

  Maddy wormed out the roughs for the ad campaign:

  Feeling overwhelmed? Depressed? Mentally exhausted? Tired of mood-altering drugs and expensive therapies? PEP’s exclusive, ASR-based technology gives you the power to cope with the ever-increasing demands of modern life. Guaranteed safe and effective, our patented Autonomous Self-Replicators deliver the power of PEP at a price you can afford. PEP—Personal Enhancement Prosthetics for a better you. PEP and PEP PLUS Accessorized Neural Architecture are trademarks of Braintree, Inc. PEP—For The Life You Deserve.

  And Marina was to have been chief spokesmodel. Her career trajectory was mapped out with the mathematical precision of a mission to Mars: pop princess to sitcom star to glamour girl to Big-Time Movie Actress to Media Saint. And right when she was at her peak, beloved by billions around the world, she would become the face of PEP. Who wouldn’t trust America’s Sweetheart? Anything with her face on it sold millions. Hearts and minds, hearts and minds. Don’t worry about the hardened cynics; aim for the sweet spot, the big soft middle. Sell the sizzle not the steak.

  The girl had been their grandest experiment: an artificial icon, a perfect pop star, a pretty human puppet made to sell strings.

  But Marina went bust. The merry-go-round broke down.

  Marina had awakened. Over the years of stupid pet tricks, she had somehow come to her senses and rebelled against being the clone they wanted—the Hannah Montana Candidate.

  Maddy could see it all: how the starlet had spiraled into depression, dabbled with drugs and dangerous diets, and even tried to kill herself. But they caught her, cooled her down, wired her up again for another try. Marina’s implant was too valuable to destroy—they had invested too much time, money, and technology just to kill her. Better to kill her memories. Starve her brain of oxygen until it got soft, then snip off the troublesome bits. Lather, rinse, repeat, until total amnesia was induced. Then fill the void with … someone new.

  There were arguments made against this; not all the scientists were on the same page. Few on staff objected to adult terrorists and criminals being purged and rerecorded, but many had ethical misgivings about doing it to minors. There was a big fight over it—Maddy recovered tons of heated, deleted correspondence.

  The justification offered by Mogul Corporate was that this was the purpose of their existence, doctors and patients alike. Unlike the adult subjects, the minors all arrived at Braintree either severely brain-damaged or legally deceased. Their personalities were already secondhand. That was cold comfort to the aggrieved doctors, particularly those who had signed on as adoptive parents of their test subjects—a necessary means to acquiring the orphans in the first place.

  Over the years of intensive monitoring, Marina’s adoptive father, “David Sweet,” (actually Dr. Neil Breitling) had grown very attached to his troubled “daughter,” and objected to her personality being erased. He was not just a drone Placeholder, programmed with recycled feelings, but an aging, divorced scientist with heavy alimony payments. Placeholders were useful under optimal conditions such as existed in Harmony, but for a high-profile implantee like Marina, operating in the real world, it was necessary she be accompanied at all times by her actual sponsor. For Dr. Breitling, the emotional pressure of this task had already cost him his marriage and children. And the company wanted to rob him of the only thing he had left: Marina.

  Likewise, Maddy’s dad, “Roger Grant” (actually Dr. Bernard Fenster), truly cared for her, and when he found out that her pure and painstakingly catalogued life experiences were needed to replace Marina Sweet’s corrupt ones, he was appalled. Not only because he didn’t want Maddy’s innocent mind to be put in the dysfunctional brain of an overindulged and self-mutilating pop princess, but because Maddy—his Maddy, the real Maddy—would then have to be wiped and replaced.

  Objections were raised, which set off a series of corporate crackdowns and even government intervention. There were resignations, terminations, quashed leaks to media. Behavior-modification programs became compulsory, and national security was invoked to justify the creation of a special squad tasked with putting out media fires before they could spread—the dreaded Firemen.

  The people chosen to be Firemen were some of the earliest Braintree subjects, dregs of the criminally insane who had initially been cured by their implants but later developed strange tics as a result of their long interface with the Leech-Tron. They were frightening characters though utterly docile unless commanded otherwise by Dr. Stevens.

  From the scanty available records, Maddy suspected it was these Firemen who caused the mysterious disappearance of Dr. Vanessa Hunt—Ben Blevin’s crusading mother—and drove Dr. Fenster to take his own life … which Braintree restored to him, along with the behavioral chip that enabled him to resume the role of Maddy’s daddy.

  Such events prompted the divorce-and-remarriage scenario, an attempt to salvage at least one “average household” from the mess. Maddy’s mother could be paired with Ben’s father. Not an ideal solution, but the rationale was that divorce was typical enough to not constitute a fatal breach in the family dynamic. Marina/Maddy could still fall within normal, healthy parameters. The superstar scenario would have to be scrapped, of course, but in some ways Marina might be even more useful as a plain Jane. As Maddy Grant, she would be nobody; she would be invisible—the ultimate spook.

  But before they could erase Marina’s scratched master reel and
dub Maddy over it, a boy had come—a boy Marina had secretly been communicating with for some time.

  The boy was one of the roadies for her show, a high-school dropout and former carnival mechanic named Duane Devlin. Marina and Duane had raided Dr. Breitling’s personal computer and learned the whole story. There was a police report filled with Duane’s frantic testimony, which went utterly ignored. After failing to interest the media, then nearly being arrested by local law enforcement, Duane had come up with a plan for getting them both to Canada.

  At Marina’s next gig—a traveling carnival in Denton, Colorado—she was to leave the show early, ditch her people and the paparazzi, and meet Dev at the fun house. Once inside, the two of them would be met by some friends of his, who would hide them in the caravan until they could be smuggled over the Canadian border.

  But it all went wrong. Someone had spilled the beans, let the cat out of the bag—however one cared to put it, royally fucked them over. The fun house became a trap. A chamber of horrors, as the news would say.

  They were inside, waiting. The Firemen.

  A boy and a girl went in, a boy and a girl came out … just not the same boy and girl.

  Dr. Neil Breitling, Marina’s father, who had fought this, failed, and ultimately fled, took with him the only two people he could still manage to help: Madeline Grant and Ben Blevin. They were both under anesthesia, being transported to Braintree for removal of their inconvenient identities. Breitling used his credentials to have them put aboard his private helicopter. All three died in the suspicious crash.

  So Madeline Grant was dead.

  And Marina Sweet, the faded legend, whose life Maddy would once have given anything to live, was literally her own flesh and blood. The Grants were a nuclear family again. Last but not least, Marina and Dev were Maddy and Ben, trapped in this magical, mystical Valley of the Dolls, forever and ever, amen.

  Fuck that.

  Maddy wanted to barf. She wanted to scream or cry or do something, but she couldn’t because she had no body. She was the machine, and the machine was her.